Category: Uncategorized

That is the new book by Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei.  It is perhaps not so novel to students of Jean Bodin and medieval political thought, or say Chinese history, but still the book crystallizes a moment and I consider its publication a matter of note.  Here is one short bit:

But which hierarchical relations are justified and why?  In our view, it depends on the nature of the social relations and the social context.  As a method, we are inspired by Michael Walzer’s call for a pluralistic approach to justice.  There is no one principle of justice appropriate for all times and places.  Our main argument is that different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations.  What justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens; what justifies hierarchy among citizens is different from what justifies hierarchy among countries; what justifies hierarchy among countries is different from what justifies hierarchies between humand and animals, and…The sum total of our argument is that morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives…

The discussion of the Kama Sutra, and its notions of hierarchy, was interesting too.

1. Sino-African architecture.

2. Phasing out squat toilets in Tokyo (a few years ago they were 40% of the total).  And has Germany moved to a de facto UBI?

3. “‘Parasite’ Backers Gain $100 Million on Film Tackling Inequality.”

4. New Yorker covers Bryan Caplan on Open Borders.

5. Types of highway interchanges and their efficiency ratings.

6. Seeking to abolish the family?  Crazy and and maybe evil too, but interesting.

Young and Chen, 2020: Consumer-driven health care is often heralded as a new quality paradigm in medicine. However, patients-as-consumers face difficulties in judging the quality of their medical treatment. With a sample of 3,000 U.S. hospitals, we find that neither medical quality nor patient survival rates have much impact on patient satisfaction with their hospital. In contrast, patients are very sensitive to the “room and board” aspects of care that are highly visible. Quiet rooms have a larger impact on patient satisfaction than medical quality, and communication with nurses affects satisfaction far more than the hospital-level risk of dying. Hospitality experiences create a halo effect of patient goodwill, while medical excellence and patient safety do not. Moreover, when hospitals face greater competition from other hospitals, patient satisfaction is higher but medical quality is lower. Consumer-driven health care creates pressures for hospitals to be more like hotels. These findings lend broader insight into unintended consequences of marketization.

It doesn’t surprise me that consumers respond much more to nice nurses than to survival probabilities. Nice nurses are observable by patients but survival probabilities can only be estimated from sophisticated statistical models. I do wish that patients paid more attention to the outputs of sophisticated statistical models when choosing doctors and hospitals, as I think this would improve quality, but mostly they don’t. As a result, competition increases patient satisfaction but less clearly increases medical quality and medical excellence. The authors, in fact, argue that competition reduces medical quality but that part of their paper is weaker than the former and the bulk of the economic literature indicates that hospital competition also increases quality albeit not strongly and with some mixed results.

Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.

1. Martin Gurri watch, Scandinavian Airlines edition.

2. Profile of Zucman and Saez (NYT).

3. How the internet is changing chess (and by extension everything).

4. Dog surveillance.

5. De-convexifying the hotel checkout time (NYT).  Small steps toward a much better world…

6. Ten ways in which we are decadent?

The introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) allows the central bank to engage in large-scale intermediation by competing with private financial intermediaries for deposits. Yet, since a central bank is not an investment expert, it cannot invest in long-term projects itself, but relies on investment banks to do so. We derive an equivalence result that shows that absent a banking panic, the set of allocations achieved with private financial intermediation will also be achieved with a CBDC. During a panic, however, we show that the rigidity of the central bank’s contract with the investment banks has the capacity to deter runs. Thus, the central bank is more stable than the commercial banking sector. Depositors internalize this feature ex-ante, and the central bank arises as a deposit monopolist, attracting all deposits away from the commercial banking sector. This monopoly might endangered maturity transformation.

Here is the NBER working paper by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, Daniel Sanches, Linda Schilling, and Harald Uhlig.  Here is my earlier Bloomberg column with similar themes.

I had not known of this important piece.  From 2012, by Robert D. Woodberry, at the National University of Singapore:

This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

For the pointer I thank Ann Swidler.

1. Toward a simple critique of applications and why most of them fail.

2. Additional results on migration and wages (The Economist).

3. “Higher salaries, legal protections and lack of discrimination said to be among the reasons most Palestinians would prefer to work for Israeli firms.”

4. The relentless bid? (from 2014)

5. Techcrunch covers Daniel Gross and Pioneer.

Here is a new paper from Joy Buchanan, Emergent Ventures winner:

Having a larger high-skill workforce is good for economic productivity, so it is useful to understand how workers self-select into high-paying technology jobs. This study examines how workers on the margin decide whether to pursue tech jobs, including a precise control for the opportunity cost of time. The most important determinant of the reservation wage for college students to do computer programming is whether they enjoy it or not. Another subjective influence, whether subjects like math or not, predicts self-confidence. Most students, including females and minorities, are willing to learn a new computer programming language, for a sufficiently high wage. Neither randomly assigned encouragement nor extra information on the programming task increases willingness to participate or increases confidence.

I often say that economics is too often solely the study of incentives, whereas real world problems end up solved because entrepreneurs opt for a potent mix of selection and incentives.  Selection is often the more important part of that brew.  Get people doing what they like, and you cannot boil a stone into a turnip.  It is also noteworthy from the paper that a lot of people really do not seem to like programming.

1. Race in Stanford economics enrollment.

2. The political composition of journalists, as reflected by their Twitter feeds.

3. “I managed to walk to the North Pole, but I didn’t manage to walk to the airport from Boston.”

4. When did “Big Hair” peak?  The data.

5. Florida school choice seems to have worked.

6. U.S. higher education has a foreign money problem (my Bloomberg column).

The application form is here, lists of previous cohorts of winners are here.  And please note there are two special tranches:

Progress Studies tranche, and a tranche for:

“advancing humane solutions to those facing adversity – based on tolerance, universality, and cooperative processes”

And might anyone be interested in working on the issue of why production speeds for infrastructure and so many other projects have slowed down so much?

There has been a very impressive group of winners to date.